SUGUK 1st March 2012

Matt Taylor has stepped down as co-coordinator for London and I want to thank Matt for all his efforts and establishing such a great user group.

So Steve Smith started proceedings with some ITPro and End User snippets. Starting with a small 3 slide long PowerPoint he dived straight into some demos.

The demos began with some SMTP love, must admit most of this talk of AD etc went a little over my head so frantic note taking was the order of the day. There were some neat tips about delegating administration via a customised MMC console and how to get around some production system challenges regarding SharePoint self-managing AD stuff.

Next demo came down to SQL Server databases and the fact that SP doesn’t always do the best defaults. I learnt some nice things about pre-creating a SQL database then using Central Admin to ensure that defaults were better suited to a production scale. Also the points about database growth were very interesting and I could see how these could be quickly leveraged to improve performance.

Finally was a quick run through of some Office functionality connecting search into the Office application and how to configure ‘save as’ links from the MySite UPA.

Then a short break in proceedings gave me just enough time to connect up my laptop and hope it played nice with the projector…. something about this W520 hates projectors….

Breathing a sigh of relief I launched into a Dev centric topic of Extending the Activity Feed within SP2010. The demo source code can be downloaded from code download and the slides can be seen below.